In his incredibly creative lifetime, Paul Cezanne produced around nine-hundred paintings and four-hundred watercolors. He was such a studied and careful painter, that it would sometimes take him up to one-hundred sessions to finish one single painting. Due to their unusual spatial layout and perspective, his paintings seemed to be painted from different points of view (Smith 108). In a post-impressionist movement, Cezanne was an innovator because he used color as a line to build form and space so that they were inseparable. He created contrasts and light effects to intensify one another to substitute the transition of lines; reduced his subjects to geometric planes, lines, cones, spheres, cylinders, and he used color modulation to explore visual properties of shapes and colors and how they interact with each other. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty believed that Cezanne’s work highlighted the contours of what we view in our everyday life, and that the artist expressed a more individualistic view (Miri 376). Ponty also wrote that Cezanne’s paintings represented a “lived perspective” because our living body is a natural union of the mind and biology, and it would be artificial to try to divide them (Miri 104). In his investigations of perspective, Cezannae discovered that the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one” (Merleau-Ponty 14). And Cezanne’s “lived perspective” was also a forced perspective, as in some of his still lifes, objects seem larger farther away than they would close up. Cezanne recognized the flat space of the picture plane, and he did not use a classical linear perspective but an avant garde approach depicting three-dimensional objects from more than just a single point of view, and as he observed them directly from life. Cezanne felt that it would be deceitful to use techniques which would copy three dimensional environments because the viewer, he thought, always knew the painting was a flat surface. He created a link between impressionism and Cubism, and many of his paintings are Cubist abstracts. Cezanne’s unique, abstract technique consisted of a distorted perspective, the use of geometric shapes to represent nature, and a medley of color planes to create depth, all of which made him an innovator and the pioneer of avant-garde modern art.
Paul Cezanne seemed to relish being an outsider in the world of art, as he willingly led a reclusive life in southern France. He was known for his indecision, anxious nature, fits of temper, and depression (Merleau-Ponty 60). The fortune that he eventually went on to inherit from his father afforded him the luxury to dedicate his life to his painting, and he did not have to cater to the ideas and rules of the Salon.
He was born in Aix-en-Provence in France, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. His best friend growing up was future novelist Emile Zola, who was the first to describe his friend as “ a genius gone wrong” (D’Souza). Zola moved to Paris to write, and he encouraged Cezanne to go to Paris to study art. But Cezanne’s family expected their son to become a lawyer and take over his father’s position as co-founder of the bank. However, young Cezanne had developed artistic interests which disappointed his family, but they still agreed to give him a small allowance so that he could go and study art in Paris (paul- cezanne). Later in his life, Cezanne was supported in his career by his family, and he eventually received his inheritance, which allowed him to continue painting with no financial concerns. In Paris, Cezanne was attracted to the more radical side of Parisian art, and he appreciated the Romantic Eugene Delacroix, the younger master, Courbet, and Manet whose realist paintings were considered to be outrageous at the time (Reff 650). Once in Paris, young Cezanne met impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Pisarro had an unconventional attitude to art, and he rejected tradition, traits which Cezanne greatly admired (Reff 650). They were both unconventional because neither of them had received traditional artistic training, and they became close friends and worked together for about ten years. Cezanne used many of Pissarro’s techniques in his paintings, and his palette of colors became increasingly lighter. Merleau-Ponty wrote that Cézanne learned a great deal from Pissarro and Impressionism, but was pursuing nature in itself, and not a technical interpretation of nature. “One must therefore say that Cézanne wished to return to the object without abandoning the Impressionist aesthetic which takes nature as its model” (Merleau-Ponty 61). After only a few years in Paris, Cezanne moved to a secluded village in Provence, where as a child he had lived, far from his family and the art world of Paris (paul-cezanne). At the time, Cezanne was doing something very different from the Impressionists, as Cezanne used color modulation to deform visible boundaries. Perhaps without limitations of lines, he would feel liberated from his anxiety, doubt, and fear. The familiar landscapes of his roots was where Cezanne went on to paint his most innovative landscapes.
In his beginnings in the late 1860s, Cezanne was rejected entry to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and he was admitted to the Atelier Suisse, where Courbet had studied. His friends Zola and Pissarro were his only champions, as his fellow artists believed he had a very peculiar and excessive style (Smithsonian). He painted expressively with dark colors and a palette knife, and he worked from inside a studio. Cezanne’s early paintings were of a Romantic style influenced by Eugene Delacroix, as he admired how Delacroix did not hide his brushstrokes and used color instead of line to structure his compositions (Danchev 385). Cezanne’s style was different from the impressionist painters of his day who painted urban landscapes in which they focused on depicting light in order to represent an ephemeral moment. At the time, Cezanne’s subject matter was violent, dramatic and moody, and he wanted to prove that history painting was not yet over. In what is one of his largest paintings, The Abduction, Cezanne paints a scene from mythology representing the Lord of the Underworld, Hades’s abduction and rape of Persephone, the young goddess of spring (paul cezanne). His painting, Murder, represented a sort of purification from his over-demanding family, and a father who had, early on, destroyed some of his son’s paintings (paul-cezanne).
In Achille Emperaire, Cezanne painted his artist friend Achille, who was a dwarf (musee-orsay). In the painting, we can see Achille from the front, and he is seated on what looks like a throne, in what Cezanne used as a double entendre because of his hatred of Napoleon III, and his friend’s surname. The painting depicts Achilles’ deformed and feeble body. Cezanne’s work was rejected at the Salon, and his paintings were described as controversial, having a skewed perspective, and even barbarian (Danchev 5). At the same time, Manet’s and Pisarro’s work was also rejected, and the three artists would only see their work displayed at the Salon des Refuses. Cezanne was also influenced by the revolutionary spirit of Realism and Gustave Courbet’s work. In his early years Cezanne did a portrait of his father and represented him reading a leftist newspaper, which his conservative father would not have approved of. The painting was thought to be a sort of declaration of independence from his father, who had wanted his son to follow his footsteps as a banker. In the early 1870s, Pissarro encouraged Cezanne to go and live in southern France so that they could work together. At this point, Cezanne changed his style of painting. He began working in the open air, and Pisarro would go on to influence Cezanne’s style in terms of brushwork and use of a lighter color palette (Reff 629). Cezanne was also attracted to the style of Edouard Manet because, like Manet, he did not feel obligated to only paint one style of art. And Manet’s flat painting style which makes the viewer look at the work from a three dimensional perspective, while at the same time, calling attention to the two dimensional canvas, were the aspects that Cezanne appreciated and used in his own paintings (Smith 105). Though Manet was no fan of Cezanne’s work, which he called “uncouth” (Willette). For his time, Cezanne was a risk taker, and his originality made him a rejected painter in most artistic circles. But in terms of perspective, his risk taking and originality made him an innovator of a new style of painting which avoided linear clarity.
Cezanne might have continuously asked himself what part of our experience is the most real. Though he knew what he wanted to paint, he looked for subjects that replicated the vision he had in his head, and he only represented his own strong feelings towards the subject (Smith 105). But his paintings can be described as distorted representations of his subjects, and this may be due to the fact that he only painted his own visual perception of something, but not what the brain would make it out to be as a whole. And this is a style which can be seen replicated in fauvism and cubism (metmuseum). In the 1870s, Cezanne went to live in southern France, and his art took on lighter tones and smaller brush strokes, but he was still by no means an impressionist painter; his style was unique because it was abstract in its exploration of color to create depth, and it did not fit into any category. Unlike the Impressionists who painted the reflection of color and effects of light in their work, Cezanne would always remain constant to his dedication of three-dimensional composition. His anarchist friend Camille Pissarro was his idol, and together with Claude Monet, the two were his main influences at the time. Cezanne’s paintings were more substantial than his mentor Pisarro’s work because his work actually did represent the totality he so sought to achieve, which was to represent changing sensations, abrupt interactions, and not just separate objects (Eisenman, et al. 492).
He brought his mistress, Madame Hortense Fiquet, to southern France when he left Paris in order to avoid being drafted to the Franco-Prussian war. Cezanne eventually married Madame Hortense, and she posed for twenty-seven portraits over a period of twenty years. The portraits of Madame Hortense are an important part of Cezanne’s collection, and they show Cezanne’s constructive strokes which build up his geometric forms and create dimension. In his portraits, the head of Madame Hortense always seems to be a bit off center, and true to his unrelenting style, he most often represented his wife with what became her famous scowl (Trachtman). It was known that Cezanne had a tormented relationship with women, maybe even feared them. He was haunted by self-doubt and failure and obsessed with representing nature competently (D’Souza). The flowers, apples and other fruits he would paint would rot and wither because he would take so long to paint them. Cezanne would also make his human subjects sit for hours because of his painstaking painting process; therefore, it may have been the endless hours of tense sitting that would make Hortense scowl. Evidence of his notorious self-doubt can be surmised from his grueling painting process of building up layers of surface to create depth were re-worked over and over, and he often left parts of his canvas untouched (D’Souza). Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Armchair, is a depiction of Cezanne’s muse dressed in her favorite red dress at home, and his painting Hortense Cezanne in a Striped Skirt, both emphasize Cezanne’s visual technique and treatment of depth, which is that by transitioning from one color to another, the artist effectively replicates three dimensional space. Cezanne’s concept of realism was creative, and as he used to say, “the landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness ” (Ponty 67). His friend, painter and writer Emile Bernard told Cezanne that “a realistic painter is only an ape,” but Cezanne was trying to represent reality. Bernard said that this was “Cezanne’s suicide: aiming for reality while denying himself the means to attain it” (Ponty 70). In 1904 Cézanne wrote a letter to his friend Bernard, saying: “The painter gives concrete expression to his sensations, his perceptions, by means of line and color” (Danchev 233). Finally, it was Cezanne’s uncommon perspective that made him an avant-garde artist. And his contorted vision of his subjects would go on to influence the style of painting of turn of the century cubism and fauvism artists.
The Kitchen Table (La table de cuisine) by Paul Cezanne, 1888-18€“9
In his still life paintings of fruits, Cezanne distorted objects to create more than one single point of view. It is thought that Cezanne’s apples in his still lifes are representative of his friendship with writer Zola (In Cezanne’s Studio). In his childhood, Cezanne had defended his friend Emile Zola from bullies, and Emile gave him apples in gratitude for his help. Cezanne devoted himself to studying the natural world, and he said he wanted to “astonish Paris with an apple.” (Smithsonian). In his still lifes, Cezanne frequently painted apples, other fruits, and flowers. It would take him a considerable amount of time to set up his still lifes, and he would arrange and rearrange his subjects in order to examine them from different angles. In his work, Still Life with Apples, Cezanne painted the jars, bowl, mustard jar, and the fruit from the front, but there are no receding lines so that the viewer is not looking at the composition from a linear perspective. Instead, we can see the subjects from the top, as well as from other points of view, all in one painting. The subjects look slanted, as if they are going to fall, yet it is a still life and the work is not supposed to denote movement (Smithsonian). In another one of his more recognized paintings, Still Life: Flask, Glass, and Jug, Cezanne’s use of space conveys an illusion of depth and perspective. And in Still Life with Apples and Pot of Primroses, which was at one time owned by Claude Monet, the fruits connect harmoniously with each other in their shapes and color; however, the color modulation that he employed meant that he concentrated more on the color itself, rather than using shades of dark to light. The apples deliberately protrude forward into the foreground, yet the leaves emphasize the flatness of the two-dimensional painting and contradict a more conventional perspective (metmuseum). One of Cezanne’s quotes describes how he felt about painting still lifes:
Objects penetrate each other… They do not stop living… They spread themselves imperceptibly, interweaving by intimate reflections, like we are by our looking and our words. It is believed that a sugar bowl does not have an expression, a soul. But that changes every day too. It is necessary to learn how to approach them and coax them, these funny beings… These glasses, these plates, they speak to each other. Interminable confidences… Flowers, I gave up on. They wilt and fade immediately. Fruit is more faithful. Fruit likes to pose for a portrait. It sits there as if asking for your forgiveness for discolorations. (Cézanne-en-Provence). And Cezanne did not care if he had to forgo the correctness of outline, as his intention was not to distort nature. However, he did not mind if some details were to become distorted if they helped him achieve the effect he so desired (Gombrich 436). In this sense, Cezanne became the father of modern art.
Cezanne moved back to his birthplace in Aix-en-Provence where he painted several renditions of the geological formations at Bibemus Quarry (Guggenheim). In all of his renderings, his geometric compositions of nature are made up of flat planes of paint, yet they give an impression of depth. His quarry landscapes made perfect subjects for his geometric style, and his compositions are abstract and painted in vivid hues of orange, gold, and green. In the early 1880s, one of Cezanne’s paintings was finally displayed at the Salon. His painting, Portrait of M.L.A., represents the artist’s father reading a liberal newspaper, and is similar to an earlier rendition he had painted of his father. It was at the time when his friend Emile Zola had his book L’Oeuvre published. The main character is an artist, Claude Lantier, who is condemned to failure. In Emile Zola’s book, the character of the novelist, Pierre Sandoz declares that “all this new art, requires a genius to be fully realized” (qtd. in Jefferson 149). Most likely, Zola did not believe that Cezanne was capable of producing a great piece of art that would demonstrate his art genius. “The creativity of whatever genius he has is repeatedly aborted” (qtd. in Jefferson 155). Zola’s novel mirrors the life of several artists of the late nineteenth century, and it also parallels Cezanne’s. It was for this offense that Cezanne, who was known for his sensitive, obscure, and depressive personality, would end his friendship with Zola. Cezanne had never been well-received by the Salon, and he went off on his own to resolve the problems of his art, as he felt himself a failure. He no longer had any interest in being a part of the Impressionists, whose art he thought was transient and emotionally and intellectually frivolous (Eisenman et al., 488).
Cezanne’s final phase before he died was his most recognized, and in that respect, his most successful. His friendship with Victor Chocquet, a friend of Auguste Renoir, and Ambroise Vollard, a well-known art dealer who was a patron of many impressionist artists, helped Cezanne become a more established artist (paul-cezanne). They both supported him emotionally and financially by buying and exhibiting his paintings. Although it was shortly after this time that Cezanne would go on to inherit his father’s estate, which allowed him to continue to paint at his leisure. In the 1890s, Cezanne was living in his place of birth, Aix-en-Provence where he painted his series of paintings, Mt. Sainte-Victoire (metmuseum). He painted thirty-six paintings, and forty-five watercolors of the mountain. The mountains, quarries and caves near his hometown were Cezanne’s motif, and he studied the landscape and its color overtones, so he could paint them from different angles and under different light. Cezanne’s technique to accentuate the angles of the mountain independently represents every angles’ different point of view so that there is not only one single perspective of the mountain (metmuseum). His one-of-a-kind picture planes with geometric shapes that sometimes overlapped with each other, and a perspective that showed multiple angles, were, for their day, abstract creations, as evident in his painting, Gardanne.
Cezanne wrote that the landscape “thinks itself in me…and I am its consciousness” (paul cezanne). In his painting, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibemus Quarry, Cezanne reflected a Cubist style with his optical effects. In his dramatic painting, the vertical mountain scene looks like a sculpture, and the foreground is smaller than what is more distant. Cezanne painted the quarry and included cube-like habitats in the composition, along with oblong-shaped trees that are painted in hues of green, and orange rocks that contrast with the blue sky.
In what some art critics call his most essential series, The Card Players, the fifth and last version of the paintings is thought to be Cezanne’s best because it is the most refined, and the shapes are simpler and less abstract than his other paintings. The scene represents a model of a human still life and depicts working class men from Cezanne’s Provence estate smoking pipes and intently focused on their game of cards. Cezanne had been inspired by a painting that was on display in his local museum: a motif of the seventeenth century which was a French and Dutch genre painting that depicted drunk gamblers playing cards. However, Cezanne’s paintings represent the players as serious and introspective and in a peaceful environment. In Cezanne’s final rendition of the series, the composition is off-balance, as it is both asymmetrical and symmetrical, and the players are in opposition to each other. In typical Cezanne style, there is no emotion depicted in his subjects’ attitudes, and the card players are only interested in what they have at hand. It is highly representative of the fact that Cezanne probably only painted for himself and not for anybody else. In The Bathers, Cezanne’s largest and perhaps most successful painting, considered an absolute masterpiece, it is his final attempt to produce something he called timeless. Although he left the work unfinished before he died, he had worked on it for over six years. The painting was created using his usual technique, and it depicts a blue and gray landscape with abstract nude female and male bathers along a river. This is known as one of Cezanne’s more formal paintings because it is symmetrical, and the bathers are arranged in the triangle of the trees and river. Nicolas Poussin’s work was not exactly an inspiration for Cezanne, but they shared similar intentions in their breadth of vision and a clarity, order, and reorganization of space within a canvas (Gombrich 419).
The Bathers is the most classical of all of Cezanne’s works. Its subject represents a long artistic tradition of painting female nudes in a landscape, and it is similar to Poussin’s method of arranging elements in his landscapes, but Poussin did not paint en plein aire, whereas, Cezanne had a lot of experience painting in the outdoors (Russell). The Bathers represents the harmony of art and nature as only Cezanne could achieve through geometric shapes and patches of color to represent depth and light. Cezanne thought that Poussin’s accomplishments were that of perfection and balance, and he said his goal was to “re-do Poussin from nature” (Danchev 351).
Cezanne said, “I wanted to make out of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of museums.” He brought the fading light and transitory images of Impressionist art more clarity and permanence by emphasizing structure and solidity. He blended his intense personal expression with a down-to-earth, unsentimental representation of his subjects, and in harmony with nature. He believed that both the eyes and the mind should work together to create timeless art. He disregarded the trends of his day for his own intuitive, personal and abstract art. He said he wanted to appeal to all generations, yet his art was described as unorthodox. He was criticized by art critics and Impressionist painters, and misunderstood by the conservative art-going public because he overturned traditional rules of painting by not speaking for traditional subjects and techniques. Philosopher Maurice Marleau-Ponty wrote that Cezanne pursued reality while denying himself the method to achieve it because he did not follow contours, used no visible outline to confine color, no clearly defined visual arrangement, and no perspective (Eisenman et.al. 493). While it is true that Cezanne’s paintings may tell the viewer more about the painter himself and less about his subjects, he was always well-integrated with his environment and uncompromising in his method. Cezanne was a descendant of classical style, who developed his own style and brought the annals of art history to the twentieth century. In Emile Zola’s novel, the art world is awaiting the “man of genius” who will create works of art that will launch a new generation of artists (as qtd. in Jefferson). In the end, Cezanne became a fully realized painter and produced not one but several masterpieces in his final phase. His exceptional creative function made him the father of modern art for numerous painters, such as Paul Gaugin, Vincent van Gogh, Cubists, like Pablo Picasso, painter and sculptor, Georges Braque, or Fauvist painters Andre Derain and Henri Matisse.
Works Cited
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Jefferson, Ann, “Creativity and Procreation in Zola’s ‘L’Oeuvre’Genius in France: An Idea and Its Uses,” Princeton Scholarship Online, 19 Oct. 2017.
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Reff, Theodore. “Pissarro’s Portrait of Cezanne.” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 109, No 776, Nov., 1967, pp. 626-631.
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Smith, Paul. Cézanne’s “Primitive” Perspective, or the “View from Everywhere.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 95, No. 1 (March 2013), pp. 102-119.
Trachtman, Paul. “Cezanne” The Man Who Changed the Landscape of Art.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2006. smithsonianmag.com.arts-culture/cezanne/.
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